Luminescent transition metal compounds have been widely studied for their use in biological imaging, photochemical catalysis, light-driven fuel production, and electroluminescent devices. Conventionally, noble metal emitters have been used, but the high cost of such emitters has led to the investigation of copper as a low cost, biologically relevant alternative. The most thoroughly studied copper emitters are monomers supported by modified polypyridine and phenanthroline ligands. However, these compounds suffer from low quantum efficiencies and short luminescence lifetimes.
Recently, copper (I) amidophosphine compounds have been identified as a new class of highly luminescent compounds. Mononuclear and binuclear copper (I) compounds featuring bidentate and tridentate arylamidophosphine ligands have been found to exhibit quantum efficiencies of as high as 70%. However, the syntheses of these compounds which includes catalytic aryl amination and the use of lithium reagents and/or strong phosphide nucleophiles, has limited the synthetic versatility of these compounds.